Book it: Leach will coach again

Former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach spoke to the Jackson Touchdown Club on Monday and will sign books today at Lemuria.

OK, before the conspiracy theories begin, a few things: Yes, former Texas Tech football coaching whiz Mike Leach was in town Monday and will be tonight.

Yes, he spoke to the Jackson Touchdown Club Monday night and he will sign his new book Swing Your Sword at Lemuria this afternoon.

No, he is not meeting with anybody from Ole Miss.

Leach's visit here was set up long before Ole Miss got clobbered by Vanderbilt on Saturday, causing a firestorm of criticism of just about anything and anybody related to Ole Miss football.

"Houston (Nutt) is a good coach; Ole Miss is a good program in a great conference," Leach said Monday afternoon. "Houston's been at this a long time. It's still early. They could turn it around."

Meanwhile, anywhere in the country where coaching changes occur or are even discussed, Leach's name is bound to come up. That's because he's the best college football coach currently not coaching.

"Yes," he answered, quickly, when asked if he plans to coach again.

"I look forward to coaching again, preferably at a place where the administration is stable, and winning and graduation rates are important," Leach said. "I miss coaching. I want to coach."

Currently, Leach, 50, does a daily, three-hour, mid-day radio show on SiriusXM Radio.

He reportedly was interviewed twice this past offseason for the Maryland job that went to former UConn coach Randy Edsall.

"You'd have to ask the people at Maryland," Leach said, when asked why he didn't get the Maryland job.

Never played

Avid college football fans, please endure this brief background sketch of Leach, meant for those who don't follow the game closely.

Leach, born in California and raised in Wyoming, never played football in college.

He graduated in three years from BYU and then graduated in the top third of his law school class at Pepperdine. He had coached Little League baseball, which he enjoyed, as a teen, but his passion was football. Before hanging a shingle, he decided to give his passion a try. He decided to coach.

"I was going to give it two or three years and then get back to being a lawyer," Leach said. "I got hooked. I never quit."

You can read all about it in his book, co-authored by Bruce Feldman, who also wrote Meat Market, the splendid book that detailed Ed Orgeron's recruiting at Ole Miss.

Swing Your Sword is a good read, a fast read. I read it in two sittings and found it intriguing with many well-told anecdotes. To say Leach chose the coaching path less traveled is an understatement of immense proportion.

"You never know who you are until you get out of your comfort zone," Leach writes. He should know.

Here's a guy who put off lawyering to become a $3,000-a-year graduate assistant coach at Division II Cal Poly. From there, Leach went to College of the Desert in Palm Desert, Calif., and then to Pori, Finland, where, Leach writes, "half my players smoked cigarettes on the sidelines."

His break came when Hal Mumme hired him as an assistant at Iowa Wesleyan, a small NAIA school where Leach and his wife and first daughter lived in a one-bedroom trailer.

After success there, Mumme and Leach went to Valdosta State, where their wide-open offense won big and helped lead them to Kentucky.

After two years there, Leach left Mumme to become the offensive coordinator for Bob Stoops at Oklahoma in 1999. After only one season, he landed the head coaching job at Texas Tech. There his, spread-the-field-and-hit-them-where-they-ain't offense gained national renown.

84-43 at Tech

At Texas Tech, Leach's teams won 84 games and lost just 43. The Red Raiders broke a boatload of offensive yardage and scoring records and were once ranked as high as No. 2 in the nation.

Ole Miss fans will remember that Leach's teams won two shootout victories over Eli Manning and the Rebels, including a 49-45 victory in 2003 in Oxford in which B.J. Symons threw for 661 yards and six touchdowns. One of Symons' favorite targets was a little slotback named Wes Welker, who had 10 catches for 131 yards that night against the Rebels and still catches a pass or two these days from a guy named Brady.

"Great game, two great quarterbacks," Leach said. "We got way ahead, they they came back and went ahead and then we came through at the end and won it. What I remember is that they had just enclosed the end zone at Ole Miss and how loud it was."

Most readers will know about Leach's well-publicized undoing at Tech in 2009. After lengthy, contentious contract negotiations, the university fired Leach over his treatment of Adam James, the son of ESPN analyst Craig James. Leach's side of the story is detailed in his book, and his lawsuit against Tech is still pending before the Texas Supreme Court.

The guess here is that Tech eventually will pay Leach a pile of money.